The authors of this book have developed a new and stimulating approach to the analysis of the transitions of Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Slovakia to democracy and a market economy. They integrate interdisciplinary theoretical work with elaborate empirical data on some of the most challenging events of the twentieth century. Three groups of phenomena and their causal interconnection are explored: the material legacies, constraints, habits and cognitive frameworks inherited from the past; the erratic configuration of new actors, and new spaces for action; and a new institutional order under which agency is institutionalized and the sustainability of institutions is achieved. The book studies the interrelations of national identities, economic interests, and political institutions with the transformation process, concentrating on issues of constitution making, democratic infrastructure, the market economy, and social policy.

This book examines the way democracy is thought about and lived by people in the post-communist world.

Policy scientists have long been concerned with understanding the basic tools, or instruments, that governments can use to accomplish their goals. The initial interest in inductively developing comprehensive lists of generic instruments for policy analysis soon gave way to efforts to discover more parsimonious, but still useful, specifications of the elementary components out of which instruments can be assembled. Moving from a generic instrument to a fully specified policy alternative, however, requires the designer to go much beyond the elementary components. Rather than directly specifying some of these details, the designer may instead set the rules by which they will be specified. The creation of these specifications and rules can be thought of as institutional design. This book helps scholars and policy analysts formulate more effective policy alternatives by a better understanding of institutional design. The feasibility and effectiveness of policies depend on the political, economic, and social contexts in which they are embedded. These contexts provide an environment of existing institutions that offer opportunities and barriers to institutional design. A fundamental understanding of institutional design requires theories of institutions and institutional change. With a resurgence of interest in institutions in recent years, there are many possible sources of theory. The contributors to this volume draw from the variety of sources to identify implications for understanding institutional design.

This volume illustrates and synthesizes new theories of institutional design recently developed by scholars across a range of disciplines.

The establishment of electoral systems in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan presents both a complex set of empirical puzzles and a theoretical challenge. Why did three states with similar cultural, historical, and structural legacies establish such different electoral systems? How did these distinct outcomes result from strikingly similar institutional design processes? Explaining these puzzles requires understanding not only the outcome of institutional design but also the intricacies of the process that led to this outcome. Moreover, the transitional context in which these three states designed new electoral rules necessitates an approach that explicitly links process and outcome in a dynamic setting. This book provides such an approach. Finally, it both builds on the key insights of the dominant approaches to explaining institutional origin and change and transcends these approaches by moving beyond the structure versus agency debate.